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February 7, 2014 by H-Diplo·Comments Off on Roundtable 6-6 on Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958

H-Diplo has assembled a very impressive interdisciplinary (and international) lineup for this roundtable; all four reviewers provide, in my opinion, excellent analysis. Each of them finds much to praise about the book under review, in particular Ted Hopf’s fascinating historical account of Soviet political culture during the first thirteen years of the Cold War and how it shaped, and was shaped by, elite conceptions of Cold War foreign policy. All of them have some criticisms, primarily methodological ones about Hopf’s employment of International Relations (IR) positivist theorising in the book. In this introduction I will briefly summarise the four reviews and then offer a couple of concluding points.

October 18, 2013 by H-Diplo·Comments Off on Roundtable 6-3 on Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation

Many scholars and policymakers concerned with the proliferation of nuclear weapons assume that the passage of time has made it much easier for states and terrorist groups to achieve their nuclear ambitions. For example, in their book The Nuclear Express, Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman reflect this common assumption: “Any well-industrialized society with the intellectual firepower, economic resources, and government determination can join the nuclear club less than three years from go.”[1]

Over the last decade much of the best work in comparative politics and international relations has focused on explaining the onset and termination of civil wars. In her new book, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, Fotini Christia seeks to explain the constant shifts in alliances that characterize these conflicts. With a combination of theoretical richness, quantitative analysis, and extensive fieldwork in Bosnia and Afghanistan, Christia has produced an important and innovative book that will surely have an important influence on the field of civil war studies and international conflict.

May 28, 2013 by H-Diplo·Comments Off on Article Review 24 on “When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention.”

Robert Pape adds to a growing literature that is trying to develop a more cohesive approach to controlling or mitigating episodes of genocide and mass atrocity violence. His call for a more pragmatic approach is certainly laudable and his claims that the world has not fared well in preventing past genocides is certainly correct. Overall, however, his article is puzzling on a number of analytical points and his prescription for a pragmatic standard of humanitarian intervention appears to fall short of providing a clear and workable framework for alleviating mass atrocity events.

April 15, 2013 by H-Diplo·Comments Off on Roundtable 5-3, “Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy”

By the accounts of the three reviewers below, Kelly Greenhill has hit a home run. Their collective view substantiates the judgment of the International Studies Association (ISA), which gave Weapons of Mass Migration the Association’s Best Book of the Year Award for 2011. In turn, the reviewers and the ISA have confirmed my judgment of four years ago that this is an especially important book in the field of security studies.

November 28, 2012 by ISSF editor·Comments Off on Roundtable 4-9, “A Stability-Seeking Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and Secessionist Conflicts”

In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, one of the first challenges to the illusion that the “end of history” had arrived was the breakup of Yugoslavia, as various republics—Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Kosovo—seceded or attempted to secede from the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia. Conflict over secession from existing states was not a new issue since secession had plagued a number of new African nations such as Katanga’s attempted secession from the Congo and Biafra from Nigeria in the 1960s as well as the prolonged struggle of Eritrea to break away from Ethiopia since the 1950s. The Cold War, however, had significantly influenced the response of the major powers to secession, as Jonathan Paquin notes, with the United States opposing territorial changes as part of its containment strategy. In A Stability-Seeking Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and Secessionist Conflicts, Paquin focuses on six cases: the four provinces of Yugoslavia, Eritrea and Somaliland, the northwest region of Somalia, that seceded in 1991.

November 5, 2012 by ISSF editor·Comments Off on Roundtable 4-6, “American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security”

The community of national security scholars benefits whenever Richard K. Betts publishes a new article or book, because his work is consistently well researched, gracefully written, thoughtful, and provocative. I find this work to be no exception and said so on the jacket cover when the book was published. The distinguished reviewers gathered here agree that Betts has produced another worthy volume, although some are disappointed at what they see as an overly shrill tone in some chapters. One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is that Betts emerges as an avowed dove—sort of—after a long history of sounding rather hawkish (although never extreme). Betts in fact refers to himself in the preface as a Cold War hawk, now converted into a post-Cold War dove—even if, he tells us, this “recent dovishness is of a crusty sort” (xi).Continue reading